Marillion is on holiday (for a short period) and instead have the Ukrainian group Okean Elzy entered the scene.
So sad that music from East is totally neglected y nac. I am no big friend of Ukraine, but O E is a great group and plays on the strings that makes me feel the music.
So today, I am about halfway through my Ukrainian discotek (collections of discs). CDs played with examples:
Model - Квітка
Dolce Vita - Я так хочу
Gloria - вище неба
Supersymmetria - Майже весна
So sad that music from East is totally neglected y nac. I am no big friend of Ukraine, but O E is a great group and plays on the strings that makes me feel the music.
So today, I am about halfway through my Ukrainian discotek (collections of discs). CDs played with examples:
Model - Квітка
Dolce Vita - Я так хочу
Gloria - вище неба
Supersymmetria - Майже весна
Yeah! Synergy Sunday it is. Thanks for the idea.
But first: Amin Bhatia's Interstellar Suite in cinematic 5.1 surround. Off we go!
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OK, Sequencer isn't on my hard drive, so I went to the record collection. Before I could find Sequencer, I found Fast's Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, so that's what's spinning now.
Larry Fast, Isao Tomita and Rick Wakeman were the reasons I punted on my DIY synth in the mid 70's and just bought an ARP Odyssey.....It didn't take too long before I had all sorts of DIY stuff hooked up to it though.
I'm not very well-versed in jazz, but I've always found Ornette to be instantly compelling and likeable.
That's a good one too. That LP was actually QS encoded for quadraphonic sound when it was released in the '70s; and of course that encoding is retained in the CD release. I never had an actual quad rig back in the day, and I've never gotten around to trying any software to decode the CD to 4 channels.
But this may be moot, as Larry is rumored to be considering remixing some or all of his catalog in multichannel, possibly to be made available as FLAC downloads! (To which I would say, "Shut up and take my money!")
Here's a thread about it if anyone's interested.
Hee! It was nice of them to provide those little mini-jacks on the back panel.
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I had one of the original white faced Odysseys. It had been purchased new by the parents of a young musician and was offered for sale in a local "trader" magazine for about 1/4 of the original list price. When I went to see it I found that this unit had spent more time at ARP being serviced that it had seen in use, so daddy bought the kid a Mini Moog. The ARP was still in the shipping crate from its last trip to ARP. We hooked it up, it worked, so I bought it.
Within a few months it developed a background hiss that grew louder as it was left on. After a few more months it became too loud, so I ripped it open. It became immediately obvious that the RCA CA3080 chip (round metal can) in the VCA had been changed....a few times. No other repairs were obvious. The chip became slightly warm in operation, so I did the obvious Tubelab thing to try.......put in a bigger one (OK higher temp ratings). Yes, Digikey existed in the late 70's and they sold chips (over the phone, Digikey existed, but the internet did not), so I got a ceramic packaged DIP 8, and sky wired it in......ARP fixed, never died again.
A few years later ARP offered an expander called the "Little Brother" to make it work with an old Odyssey you had to add those little mini-jacks. ARP offered a kit to do so with simple instructions. ARP stated plainly that it was NOT a DIY job, and I should take it to a qualified ARP tech. I got the kit from the music store, because I told them that I would not buy the expander without it. So, I had an Odyssey with the little jacks.....and several extra wires!
I know the KORG built "new Odysseys" have CV, gate and a few other jacks on the back, but I don't know if any of the original ARP built units did. Very few Little Brothers were ever sold, maybe that's why.
The CV outs from and ARP would drive Moog and other 1V/oct synths, but they would NOT drive a KORG since they used a different standard. I had a Univox branded Mini Korg that would not work from the ARP outputs.
Yes, I think the Korg oscillators had the simpler linear control voltage response (V/Hz), while Arp (& most everyone else) used the much more useful exponential type (V/oct). The latter made more sense since multiple control voltages could simply be summed together, but of course this approach required a stable & accurate exponential converter circuit for each oscillator (and filter). This circuit added cost & complexity and was a primary contributor to oscillator tuning instability, but it was really the only way to go.
I had the same problem when I migrated from my original PAIA modules (linear) to the Aries stuff (V/oct).
One aspect of the two approaches has always intrigued me. Both used simple summing, inverting opamp stages for multiple control voltage inputs. In the Aries with the exponential volt/freq transfer curve, the initial pitch was adjusted by trimming the offset of this stage, and the octave tuning was trimmed by the gain (neg. feedback). But in the PAIA, with linear response, these two functions were reversed: The gain of this stage would set the initial oscillator pitch, and the offset would determine the octave-to-octave tuning. I'm sure that anyone with proper math training will read this and say, "Well, duh!", but I always thought it was kinda neat.
Apologies for the thread creep. Back to the music! Time for some vintage Todd Rundgren...
I had the same problem when I migrated from my original PAIA modules (linear) to the Aries stuff (V/oct).
One aspect of the two approaches has always intrigued me. Both used simple summing, inverting opamp stages for multiple control voltage inputs. In the Aries with the exponential volt/freq transfer curve, the initial pitch was adjusted by trimming the offset of this stage, and the octave tuning was trimmed by the gain (neg. feedback). But in the PAIA, with linear response, these two functions were reversed: The gain of this stage would set the initial oscillator pitch, and the offset would determine the octave-to-octave tuning. I'm sure that anyone with proper math training will read this and say, "Well, duh!", but I always thought it was kinda neat.
Apologies for the thread creep. Back to the music! Time for some vintage Todd Rundgren...
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I forgot to mention, I have a dear old friend who played a lotta gigs back in the day with his Odyssey/Little Brother combo balanced on top of a Fender Rhodes. Talked with him for awhile at a party not long ago. These days he wishes he had kept the ARP stuff. Not as nostalgic about the piano, though: "That thing was held together with duct tape, and it was like carrying around a dead guy in a box from one dive to the next."
I wish I had kept mine too. I sold all of it for some ridiculous sum (like $200) when I got a new fangled digital Korg DW-8000 in the 80's. Wound up selling that too. The only relic that I still lave is my daughter's Roland JV-1000. It needs some fixing though.
Here nearly 50 years from the PAIA days I find myself building a nee voltage controlled synth. This time it has a mix of digital, solid state and vacuum tube analog.....trying to steal the best of all available tech, and invent the rest.
Today's vinyl selection, currently spinning, McDonald and Giles. It stayed on the turntable after searching for a song in another thread.
There was kind of a dark period there, right around the early '80s when the first digital keyboards (mainly the Yamaha DX7) began making inroads, when apparently lots of people thought, well, we don't need this old analog stuff anymore. During that time, another friend was able to score an ARP 2600 in excellent condition for four hundred bucks.
Eventually everyone realized that the digital sounds were only going to supplement the analog, not replace them! So the analog prices started going back up, and never stopped. Now it's out of control, like everything else "vintage."
I'd give my left hubcap to own a 2600, but at this rate it just ain't gonna happen.
Meanwhile: I live in an apartment, so my audio rig doesn't often get out of 1st or 2nd gear. But the upstairs neighbors are out of town, so I get to open it up a little!! Yowsah.
Now playing: King Crimson's "Thrak," Steve Wilson 5.1 remix
Eventually everyone realized that the digital sounds were only going to supplement the analog, not replace them! So the analog prices started going back up, and never stopped. Now it's out of control, like everything else "vintage."
I'd give my left hubcap to own a 2600, but at this rate it just ain't gonna happen.
Meanwhile: I live in an apartment, so my audio rig doesn't often get out of 1st or 2nd gear. But the upstairs neighbors are out of town, so I get to open it up a little!! Yowsah.
Now playing: King Crimson's "Thrak," Steve Wilson 5.1 remix
There are clone kits out there.....look for the TTSH (Two Thousand Six Hundred). Not sure of the current price, but it's still out of my range. All the schematics are on the web. A friend built his clone for about $300 not counting the keyboard itself, he used a MIDI to CV converter instead.
Now playing Hero and Heroine by the Strawbs, I opened a box of early 70's records.......yeah, nobody else is home
